Young Adults: Public Service Funding

Lord Touhig Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

My Lords, the greatest Liberal Prime Minister in the history of our country—a Welshman, naturally—David Lloyd George, speaking more than 100 years ago, after the passage in the other place of the Education Act, said that, with the powers it has created,

“the State can watch over the welfare of its children through infancy and adolescence”.

Those inspirational words are in my mind today as we debate this issue, and we should keep them in mind. I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Massey for securing this debate.

After decades of progress in tackling poor education of the young, combating poverty and disease, and providing a sound base for our children to grow and build on, it is worth taking stock of where we are now. In today’s Britain, our all-embracing education system has been skewed and distorted for a narrow political ideology, child poverty is again on the rise, and poor diet and lack of parental financial means have resulted in children becoming obese, with far too many depending on pre- and after-school clubs for a decent meal. The closure of the Sure Start schemes, mentioned by my noble friend Lady Massey, which offered hope and made a real contribution to the quality of family life, has hit areas such as mine because they no longer exist there. The charity Action for Children says that funding for young people’s services has fallen by £3 billion. More, spending by local councils on young people’s services has seen a 16% reduction—down by £1.7 billion. The charity says that there are serious regional differences in spending—a point I think the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, made. That cannot be right, and I will be interested to hear whether the Minister has something to say about this when he replies to the debate.

At the end of the day, cutting public spending to this degree will have an adverse impact, and this can be life-changing for our children and young people. In 2017, an old friend of mine, the former MP and Minister—and now the South Wales Police and Crime Commissioner—Alun Michael, spoke about the positive results that early intervention can have for young people. He wrote that early intervention in support of children who had endured adverse childhood experiences saw a 60% cut in violence, a 65% cut in incarceration, a 24% cut in smoking, and a 66% cut in the use of heroin and crack cocaine. The early intervention he spoke about involved parents, teachers, social and health workers and the police. We need a cross-government commitment to develop strategies like the one Alun Michael was speaking about, and these will need to be adequately financed. Failure to do so will consign a generation and more of children and young people to a quality of life that none of us in this House would ever tolerate for ourselves.

There is one further area I would like to speak about: support for people with autism and their families. Colleagues in the Council of Europe, on which both my noble friend Lady Massey and I serve, are working on a report on this very matter. Britain is a world leader in legalisation specifically supporting people with autism, thanks to the hard work of Dame Cheryl Gillan in the other place. She, with the help of the National Autistic Society, of which I am a vice-president, piloted the passage of the Autism Act, and this year marks its 10th anniversary. Yet, despite some progress, we know that in many areas councils are not meeting their obligations, and a postcode lottery has emerged. Recent research from the Disabled Children’s Partnership has found that there is a £434 million funding gap in children’s social care. This has concerned the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Autism, which is holding an inquiry into the Act’s implementation, ahead of the Government’s strategy review. The all-party group will report this autumn, but in evidence sessions it has held so far it has discovered some issues of concern.

The inquiry has so far discovered a lack of aspiration for young autistic people, who are not being supported to think about and achieve their goals. I and others across this House have seen so many cases where, with the right support, people with autism can gain a quality of life that could never have been imagined in the past. The inquiry has shown a lack of the right services in local areas, meaning that young autistic people who have had their needs identified cannot then get the support for themselves. Will the Minister therefore commit to ensuring that the new national autism strategy tackles the gap in services for young people on the autistic spectrum?

Another area of concern is the funding for special educational needs and disability—SEND—support. Parents across England are making the case that the Government are failing to allocate enough money to local authorities to enable them to fulfil their legal obligations to children with SEND, especially those on the autistic spectrum. Again, will the Minister comment on whether the Government believe that the funding that councils and schools receive to support children and young people with SEND is sufficient? More than that, if it is not, will he make a case to the Treasury for more money?

The National Autistic Society is a member of the Care & Support Alliance—an alliance of 80 organisations campaigning together on adult social care. The alliance has major concerns about the chronic underfunding of social care. More and more people need social care, but fewer people seem to be receiving it. If you are on the autistic spectrum, this means not getting the help you need to live independently. It means not getting help to find work—85% of people on the autistic spectrum never work. It means that if you are an autistic person in these circumstances you face a lonely life of social and workless isolation. In the short term, it is crucial that the Government address the £3.5 billion gap it is estimated there will be in social care by 2025, but we also need the Government to provide a long-term funding solution that shares the cost of social care fairly across society and delivers an improved system. I hope that that will be done through the forthcoming Green Paper, which was meant to be published in 2017, I think. Can the Minister update the House on when the Government will bring forward the Green Paper?

I do not doubt that the Minister and the Government want only the best for our children and young people, but the best comes at a price and the issues that have been raised in this debate need to be addressed and, above all, properly funded. There is no shortcut—there is no cheap way of ensuring the best quality of life for our young people in Britain. We have to provide the money as well as the words.